


pull you through the mirror (before you come undone)

by echoist



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Anxiety, Drift Side Effects, M/M, Panic Attacks, lingering neural connections, potential abelist language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-22 16:42:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/915567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echoist/pseuds/echoist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The War is over. The war is <i>over</i>, and everyone else has something important to do and somewhere else to be except Newt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pull you through the mirror (before you come undone)

 

It had been nearly two days. 43 hours and 27 minutes by Newton's count since Marshall Hansen retired the War Clock. Only two days, and not even that if you wanted to get technical about it, since Gipsy and Striker had been lost. Since Mako and Raleigh came back alone, their minds wrapped so tightly around one another that they'd hardly uttered five words through the entire celebration that followed.

The Shatterdome had gone mad, and of course it would, Newton thought from his view through the reinforced glass at LOCCENT. Tendo had nearly passed out at the controls. Herc had turned away, his strong, battered frame bent double with grief. Hermann had grabbed Newt and held him so tightly that he thought the man might never mean to let go. From the cascade of burned out thoughts leaking across their lingering neural bond, Newt was fairly certain that was exactly his partner's intent, at least in the moment. He understood. With everything they'd lost over the course of one night, just one simple gap between dusk and dawn, Newt couldn't bring himself to let go, either.

Gipsy Danger. Cherno Alpha. The Kaidonovskys. Crimson Typhoon. Chung, Hu, and Jin Wei Tang. Striker Eureka. Chuck Hansen and Marshall Stacker Pentecost. The litany of the dead, repeating over and over and over, no matter how loud the cheering from the garage floor. No matter how many clasped hands and embraces, no matter their world altering achievement, it couldn't drown out the roll call echoing in the silent spaces between heartbeats.

Swept away by the chaos, Hermann finally extricated himself from the shouting throng and moved to stand by Newton's side once more. He looked down, more shy and hesitant than Newt had ever seen him, leaning a bit on his shoulder as if the load had finally become too heavy to carry on his own. Newt threw his arm around Hermann's shoulders, letting him rest there as long as he needed. He didn't have to say it; Hermann knew. Hermann would always know.

 

But that was two sunrises come and gone, two nights creeping into the neon lit warren of streets Newt looked out on from large, shaded windows. The corridor on an upper story of the Shatterdome had been built as a reminder of all that was at stake, and what they were here to protect. He'd spent entire nights pacing the rusted hallways and staring down at the city below, watching the processions of red robed monks through the streets, seemingly impervious to the chill winter rains. He leaned against the glass, Reckoner's immense skull filling his vision while nearby the skeletonized ribcage curved ever upward through the Bone Slums, offering a silent paen to the heavens. He wondered what they would do, now that their gods were dead. Newt supposed that had never stopped anyone before.

After the festivities had finally died down, the official business of shutting down the Jaeger program had begun in earnest. Crews worked around the clock, slowly gathering and categorizing leftover parts, ready to ship away for recycling. After twelve long years in the shadow of terror, the perseverance of steel and strategy had at last come to its inevitable end. Without any Jaegers left to scrap back together, technicians and engineers crawling over the massive frames like a parade of carrion insects in reverse, their crews would be moving on. It was quiet, or at least as quiet as a hollow metal facility that housed thousands of workers could ever manage. Quiet enough to mark the shift, and just eerie enough to set Newton's nerves on edge.

He turned away and took the winding stairs down to the crew quarters, passing Herc Hanson sitting on the steps leading up to his room. Max lay sprawled out at his feet, drooling onto the floor. Newt nodded as he passed, and Herc gave him a brief upward jerk of his head in response, the closest he would ever get to a thank you for his efforts. It was enough. He knelt down and took Max's floppy face in his hands, giving him a thorough scratching behind the ears. He'd never minded his hands coming back covered in saliva and short strands of fur. It couldn't be any worse than being elbow deep in a Kaiju lymph node. Herc favored him with a poor impression of a smile, and Newt stood up, his knees cracking sharply. He continued on his way without a word; there was nothing left to say.

One more level down and Newt raised his passkey to the giant metal doors that sealed access to the K-Science labs. The doors scrolled back slowly, and it took a moment before his feet would agree to cross the threshold. Hermann's side of the lab was immaculate, the chalkboards wiped clean, large fireproof boxes filled with alphabetized reports and dossiers, memos marked 'Top Secret' and academic treatises on Hermann's theories and hypotheses. His screens were dark, the back ups and backups of his backups presumably packed away as well.

Two days, Newton repeated to himself. Less than two days, and he was sharing a room with a ghost.

 

Newt knew Hermann hadn't left yet, could still feel him shuffling about the facility like a tiny bioelectric signature he couldn't stop tracking. He'd tried, but even in his dreams, when he was lucky enough to catch a few hours of sleep, he still knew precisely where Hermann had wandered and what occupied his time. They hadn't spoken much since the closing of the Breach, a sudden awkwardness springing up between them as the aftereffects of the Drift lingered in ways neither of them had anticipated. Minor foreign thoughts and impulses still drifted in and out of Newt's peripheral vision, sending a slight shiver across the surface of his mind. He knew that Jaeger pilots could usually shake this sort of thing off, retreating back into themselves after terminating the neural handshake, their memories once again their own. He had a personal theory about why that hadn't worked for the two of them, but for the time being, Newt was intent on keeping his mouth firmly shut.

He queued up the loudest music he could find on his system and slung off his jacket, digging into the mess. He lost himself in the piles of cables and copper pins, pilfered power sources, their extension leads and all manner of bolts and wrenches littering his side of the floor. Newt piled them back onto carts, sadly settling two makeshift neural interface caps on top of the stack. His work was entirely digital and easily transferred onto portable data storage units, but the scraps covered in his unique scrawl were another story. He pulled them down from screens, peeled them up off the tables and retrieved a few where they'd fallen behind the furniture. He sat down in the center of the floor and thumbed through them, each jagged strip of reused paper covered in dense lines of ink spelling out brilliant ideas and imaginings, theories he'd never get the chance to test out, and occasionally a doodle or two of Hermann. Shaking his cane at an equation that just wouldn't behave, using it to poke at an affectionate infant Kaiju, brandishing the stick at Newt for leaving entrails on his side of the room again. He smiled, and jammed the sketches in his back pocket.

Newt looked around the room at his bright collection of specimen jars, his eyes skimming past the walk in freezer filled to capacity with organ and tissue samples, and landing on a poster tacked haphazardly to the wall. It was a blueprint of Yamarashi post-autopsy, or as close as he'd been able to construct from reverse biological engineering. They'd gotten lucky with Yama, plowing through Long Beach and finally expiring in the Los Angeles River, where its corpse had been carefully excavated piece by piece.

Much to Newton's eternal frustration, Kaiju had evolved to self-destruct upon defeat, making it nearly impossible to examine their remains intact. Now, of course, he knew that it wasn't evolution at all, but simple genetic programming. He was alternately fascinated and aggravated by the hard-coded failsafe, but he had to grudgingly give the Precursors credit for their sheer, simple brilliance. It should have twisted his brain into knots, both admiring and fearing their unfathomable foe, but Newt was used to a fair amount of cognitive dissonance in his daily life.

Over his years with the PPDC, Newt had managed to scrounge what organ specimens he could here and there, but that was as far as his luck had ever extended. The great leaks of ammonia spilling from every orifice not only obliterated their immense biological structure, but literally melted anything unfortunate enough to come into contact with their remains, making retrieval a dangerous and distasteful task that came with added hazard pay. He'd made do with what he was given, searching out chinks in their armor, weak spots in their skeletal structure, and repeatedly sequencing their DNA until he'd finally unlocked their secrets.

Newt stared up at blueprint, covering several feet of the driest, least humid portion of the wall. Sticky notes surrounded the chart, labeling anatomical structures, explaining their function according to his best guess, and some simply bearing gigantic question marks. Arrows in bright colors pointed out strike zones for maximum effectiveness, lines of unreadable notation squashed into every available margin. A long white strip of paper tacked off to one side bore the line art he'd designed for his left arm, a decision he'd never once regretted despite the judgment of his fellows and whispers behind his back.

Newt glanced down at the lovingly inked beast riding his forearm, its outlines still sharp, the colors vivid, and felt something in his chest begin to crumple and tear.

 

When Hermann found him perhaps an hour later, Newt paced the floor, clutching at the sides of his head and carrying on a loud, extremely one-sided conversation with himself. This alone wasn't sufficient cause for alarm, but his frantic pulse and the observation that Newton seemed to be answering himself gave Hermann pause. The floor was littered with balls of paper that Newt occasionally kicked to one side when they got in his way.

He bent to pick one up, discarding it immediately before plucking another from the base of a specimen jar elevated to eye level. He pivoted, hurling it straight toward the doorway and stopped in his tracks as the weaponized letter bounced lightly off the top of Hermann's head.

Hermann stopped, leaning heavily on his cane, and sighed. He bent to pick up the scrap, unfolding it to reveal a department memo from three years ago, concerning reallocation of their department's funding. Newton had crossed out various words and made vulgar replacements, sketching doodles along the edges of the leaders of the Pan Pacific Alliance with gigantic heads and ghastly expressions. A stubbornly inked a list of items he'd intended to requisition for his next great experiment marched across the back side. He'd received a shipment of pushpins, magnets and a vintage calculator in return, if Hermann remembered correctly, and had flown about the room in an impressive rage.

'Did you know that this room has 352 tiles?' Newt asked without apologizing for the projectile. 'I counted them. Twice.' Hermann waited, knowing there would be more to follow. '143 of them are on your side,' Newt informed him. '209 on mine,' he finished, resuming pacing across those self-same tiles.

'I didn't bother with precise calculations when I divided up our work space,' Hermann answered calmly. _Hypervigilance_ , he thought, noting the way Newton's steps landed precisely in the center of each rubber tile, missing all the cracks.

'That makes sense,' Newt replied with a wave of one hand. 'I mean, why would you of all people have allocated more space for my research when you've clearly always felt that your work was superior to mine?' He shook his head, fingers pulling small strands away with every frustrated tug at his hair. 'No,' he corrected himself sharply. 'No, Hermann, except that doesn't make any sense at all. You're the numbers guy. You had to notice. So why do I have 209? What were you trying to say?'

Hermann pressed a large yellow button on the wall and the doors slid shut behind him with a fierce metallic squawk. 'It doesn't mean anything, Newton,' he asserted. 'I taped down a line. It looked equal to me at the time.'

'Ok,' Newton answered. 'All right. But you had to notice at some point, I mean, you notice things, we're scientists, that's what we do. We pay attention. We build our lives around questions that might not even have answers. We calculate, we find errors and causation and we're _supposed_ to solve problems, not multiply them. Why didn't you move the line?'

Hermann crossed the floor to where Newton stood beside a large section of liver suspended in a greenish liquid. 'Allow me to adjust your definition,' he said calmly, as if beginning a lecture for a classroom of students. 'The history of science lies in rendering the unknown knowable, quantifiable, useful. Science makes sense out of the inexplicable by discovering along the way that we have been entirely wrong. When our assumptions are proved incorrect, we adjust our calculations and start again at the beginning. Pure science is not a machine you can pump full of spare change to dole out answers,' Hermann concluded. 'It is the pursuit of higher knowledge for its own sake.' Newton nodded his head, still counting out numbers or syllables or god only knew what else on the fingers of his left hand.

'As scientists on the cutting edge of wartime research,' Herman continued, 'we can hardly claim that such a lofty definition applied to us while under the employ of the PPDC. They expected us to be that answer machine, and god knows, we tried. However you would prefer to view your research, Newton, or mine for that matter - neither of these scenarios allowed time for calculating and dividing the number of tiles on a laboratory floor.' Hermann modulated his voice low and quiet, attempting to take Newton's question seriously and keep his annoyance to a minimum. Newton would feel his agitation, Hermann was quite certain, and the current problem would grow exponentially before he could calculate the necessary force required to counter its gathered inertia.

Newton looked up from the floor with a stare that didn't quite reach Hermann, narrowing his eyes. 'I can accept that,' he agreed at last.

'As you well should,' Herman answered, pulling Newton's hands down from his hair and lightly holding him by the wrists. Newt's face was pale, despite his rapid movements, his breathing gone quick and shallow. Beads of sweat dripped down from his forehead, and Hermann could hear his heart beating fit to burst straight through his ribs. It certainly wasn't the only time he'd seen his co-worker overtaken by a fit of anxiety, but it _was_ the first occasion he'd felt the rising panic grip him by the throat and threaten to choke out his life as well.

Ten years side by side in the Jaeger program, and he'd never known what it felt like when Newton wound himself too tight and let go the turn crank. Now Hermann scrambled to find the one key in a house full of doors that would unlock the traps set by his companion's own mind. He didn't believe in karma, but he did believe in the third Law of Motion; no matter how many times he had to redefine the variables, Hermann set himself to the task of correcting Newton's trajectory, now that the gravitational pull had dragged him in as well by proximity.

Well, Hermann reconsidered. Proximity wasn't the only relevant factor. He'd been across the base discussing future post options with Jasper Schoenfeld when he first felt the rising tide of anxiety filter into his blood. He would have extricated himself from the meeting immediately, but despite their long history with PPDC, Dr. Schoenfeld hadn't been directly involved in the Jaeger program for years. His appearance in Hong Kong, or at any of the remaining Shatterdomes was a rare thing, and Hermann had found their discussion particularly enlightening.

Now, realizing just how far along the spiral Newton had managed to entrench himself, Hermann wished he had excused himself early.

'Look at me, Newton,' Hermann commanded, quietly but firmly, and Newton raised his head, his eyes slack and out of focus. 'I want you to breathe,' he ordered in a decisive tone that brooked no argument. Newt's jaw slackened by a barely noticeable fraction and he struggled to draw in a deep breath.

Hermann pinned him in place with a focused stare, his own chest rising as he did the same. 'Again,' he urged, exhaling and matching the pace of his breathing with Newton's attempts. 'Good,' he murmured, feeling his own lungs begin to relax. Newton's pulse still raced, a vein in his neck bulging out with each thunderous beat of his heart.

Newton pulled his hands free of Hermann's grip and turned back to the large glass canister, pressing his left hand against the cool surface. His forehead followed, eyes squeezed tightly shut. Hermann could feel the headache radiating from behind his eyes, and rubbed absently at his temples. He allowed Newton to remain there for a moment, watching his chest rise and fall as his shoulders slumped. It was a start.

'What am I supposed to do now?' Newton asked miserably, glancing up at an angle. He spread his arms out to either side, stretching the worn fabric of a gray v-neck that Hermann was absolutely certain he'd thrown in the rubbish bin several months before. His waggling fingers took in the hemisphere of carefully preserved specimens resting in their cases, bloodshot eyes flickering past them wildly to home back in on Hermann's face, locking on like a laser sight.

'I don't need to remind you that you possess six doctorates,' Hermann offered, placing a firm hand on Newton's shoulder. 'You could go anywhere, do anything. Your research on artificial tissue generation permanently altered medical and genetic research around the world for the better. There's not a research institute, university or think tank that would be fool enough to turn you away, despite your...eccentricities.'

'That's not the point,' Newt heaved out, his eyes red and swollen. He shrugged off Hermann's hand and resumed pacing, only making a few passes across the room before sliding down in an ungraceful heap beside a large case choked with processors, now silent and cool. One hand clutched at his chest and Hermann could sense the caged ball of lightning nesting there, felt a numbing tingle spread across his own skin as their connection asserted itself.

'We've been with the program so long,' Newton wheezed, glancing up from the floor. 'Everything I own is here. My whole life -' he stopped to swallow around a lump in his throat. 'This is where I live,' he croaked, meaning more than just a place to lay his head.

Hermann followed him to the opposite corner, hooking his cane over a chair before carefully lowering himself to the ground. He leaned back against the metal case, sitting close enough that their shoulders brushed. Newt reached out to grasp a handful of Hermann's tragically ugly sweater, clinging to the man beside him without turning his head.

'This is my entire existence,' Newt gasped out, a small chunk of hair pulled out by the roots tangling around his shaking fingers and the fabric wound beneath them. 'And now it's all gone. It's all gone because we told them how to do it, how to destroy it, and they actually did it and now – and now -' Newton choked on his own words, coughing out a harsh breath. Hermann could feel Newton's lungs burning, starved for air, felt the electricity riding his skin like a network of live wires.

'I know,' Hermann replied gently, trying to keep his voice from wavering with empathy and shared terror. He could feel his own chest seizing up from the panicked thoughts racing through Newton's skull. His partner's mind had always outpaced his voice, and now it was stuck in an endless cycle of grief and uncertainty. Hermann clumsily wrapped his right arm around Newton's shoulders, pushing him forward enough to let Newt sink back against his chest. His left hand covered Newton's own where it clutched and scraped at the skin over his heart, wordlessly urging him to be still. Long years of squabbles and bickering seemed impossibly insignificant, more like playacting, really. They were both highly competitive by nature, and choosing to further their rivalry had produced faster, more accurate results while improved their standing with Marshall Pentecost. It was a perfectly logical arrangement, in direct counterpoint to their current situation.

'Look at me,' Hermann commanded again, and Newton glanced back over his shoulder, his left fist still grasping Hermann's thickly knit sweater. Hermann held his gaze and matched the pace of his breathing with Newton's attempts. 'Good,' he murmured again, feeling his own lungs begin to dilate and relax. 'Focus on me.' He twined his fingers through Newton's, squeezing gently, pushing slightly down with each exhalation and lifting back with each new breath.

Newton began to shake, only a slight tremor at first, but growing in frequency until Hermann thought he could generate enough power for the entire facility to function unaided. A great wave of pressure shuddered through him, passing into Hermann like an arctic rush of water. He shivered, biting down on his lip to endure the surge. Newton's entire body burned, his skin hot against Hermann's as he maintained contact, trying to ground the lightning by pure force of will.

He remained still, one breath in, one breath out, squeezing Newton's right shoulder gently in encouragement. He was far from calm, but breathing was the first step, and Hermann knew he wouldn't be going anywhere until Newton's shock and terror at last melted away. He ignored the sharp stabs of pain from his hip, the muscles contracting with agonizing force as he kept his legs folded beneath him. In the hierarchy of importance, Newton's panic ranked above a little discomfort on his part, and Hermann had lived with it long enough to know just how much he could bear.

Newton's runaway pulse gradually calmed beneath Hermann's hand, his fingers moving to stroke lightly across the back of his neck. Hermann could feel an echo of the touch through his own nerves, and the act served to calm his mirrored fears accordingly. Everything was physics, he reminded himself, and physics were defined by maths. Even this struggle could be reduced to its smallest components to find the quiet spaces between and linger there, until it was safe to let the world rush back in. Newt listed heavily toward him, and Herman's hips protested, sending a brutal spike of pain down into his left leg and whiting out his vision. He attempted to adjust the both of them without success, biting down on his own tongue and forgetting to take his own advice.

'Hey,' Newton reminded him, turning slightly and relaxing his stranglehold on Hermann's sweater. He placed his open palm over Hermann's lungs, looking up to see a spasm of pain transform his features. Newton winced and leaned forward, taking his weight off Hermann's legs. 'You have to keep breathing, too,' Newt reminded him with a heady rush of guilt. 'That's – that's how this works.'

Hermann nodded slowly in response, hissing out a thin stream of air between clenched teeth. Newton rubbed at a muscle in his own leg as the shared pain rocked through him in the space between seconds. 'I'm sorry, man,' Newton managed, knowing what he could feel was only an incremental amount of Hermann's actual discomfort. 'I really am, I didn't mean to -'

'It's – it's all right,' Hermann gulped, drawing in a deep breath and holding it. 'My fault, really.'

'No,' Newton argued. 'This whole thing is my fault, I never should have – it's not your responsibility to - oh god,' Newton realized, sitting back and shifting around to dig his fingers into the knotted muscle in Herman's leg. 'Everything, all of my -' _Crazy,_ he thought bitterly, giving in to self-loathing. _Insanity._ 'It bled over, didn't it? Just like your leg. You – you felt all that?'

Hermann moved his own clumsy fingers out of the way without answering and let Newton chip away at the pain twisting his muscles. Newt's left hand remained against Hermann's chest, and he covered it with his own, letting his rapid pulse and seizing lungs speak for him. A shuddering panic still rooted deeply through each and every molecule between them, refusing to relinquish its grip without a fight, but Hermann soon found the blinding pain to be an acceptable distraction.

_Funny, that_ , he manage to process through a cascade of synapses shorting out with each passing minute. His malformed spine had made his childhood in public boarding schools an outright nightmare, always the easy target for even the weakest of bullies. Sidelined for athletics, given doctor's excuses to remain behind from field trips, he'd essentially grown into adulthood through tenacity and grit, persistence in the face of repeated closed doors and unshakeable self-reliance. No one would work with him of course, not for any length of time, but that, too, was a predicted outcome.

Hermann was fairly certain he'd chosen his specialties not only because they came to him easily, engaging his curiosity on levels that nothing else, no _one_ else in his world had ever managed before, but because of the perfect clarity that came with the fixed solidity of numerals. Formulas and equations underlying physical laws, easily given visible form in models and simulations, if not in the universe itself - indisputable, unerring truths that had nothing to do with the messy, problematic failures of his own body.

Ten years in the company of Newton Geiszler had challenged that stability with the necessary wetwork of neural programming, and oh, how Hermann had hated him for that. He'd worked near countless other brilliant minds on numerous projects within the Jaeger program, but never truly _with_ them. It wasn't a bother; he preferred to work alone and had always made his preference abundantly clear. Yet somehow, time and again, the universe conspired to bring him back into Newton Geiszler's infuriating and irregular orbit. Even his modes of thinking had been changed; before the move to Hong Kong, before sharing close, unavoidable quarters with the man, Hermann never could have tolerated even the passing thought of an anthropomorphized universe, much less one capable of drawing two dissimilar personalities together in an awkward, yet strangely productive alliance.

Perhaps it was simple magnetism, Hermann allowed on occasion. There weren't many in the PPDC who could stand toe to toe with the mad biologist and push back every bit as hard as he shoved. In the end, here they were, permanently altered by a bizarre confluence of events that left him unable to send the man to his death, even if his sacrifice would have undoubtedly been for the greater good. He'd chosen to take a terrifying risk and share the load, something Hermann realized belatedly that Newton had been doing all along.

The man never seemed to sleep. Some mornings Hermann would shuffle into the lab with a thermos full of tea and discover his predictive models altered, a simple switch of numbers and calculations that he'd been too close and too frustrated to see. Even worse, the corrections were frequently right. The lab smelled like a bog, and Newton's side of the demarcation line frequently looked as though a tornado had blown through it, but surprisingly, Hermann had adjusted.

He'd never met another individual capable of shouting him down one moment, and settling into an empty table in the mess hall the next, calmly discussing the repercussions of climate change or the puzzles wound up in alien genetic structure as if – as if they were friends. Newton never questioned his capabilities, never kicked his cane out from beneath him for a cheap laugh. On the contrary, he only offered assistance when no one else was looking and thankfully never brought it up again, as if he understood. Perhaps he did, in his own way.

Their unorthodox Drift had borne out at least one of Hermann's private theories: no one had ever volunteered to work with Dr. Geiszler, either.

He came back to himself after an interminable amount of time, Newton's hands still massaging the ache out of his leg. The hand that had reached out to clasp his in silent understanding now rested gently on Newton's shoulder. He didn't seem to mind; in fact, putting himself to a simple, repetitive task seemed to have calmed the electric storm lighting him up like a Tesla coil with a critical short.

Hermann took in a deep breath, feeling the tension drain from his body as he slowly let it back out. He tugged Newton's fingers away from his thigh, realizing that the psoas and iliacus muscles were as stretched and calm as the adductors in his left leg. A strange ringing filled his ears, his face flushing with the knowledge of where Newton's hands had been. He must have been out cold for several minutes. That was the only reasonable explanation as to why Dr. Geiszler wasn't currently sporting a black eye.

'Thank you,' he managed to scrape past his vocal chords while staring determinedly over Newton's shoulder.

'Yeah, dude,' Newt replied to the floor, settling back in a crouch. 'No problem. I mean, least I could do, since, you know.' _Since you had to deal with an extra helping of crazy._ Time seemed to dilate as the moments ticked by, Newton's heart rhythm still loud and fierce in the silence that settled around them. He finally pushed himself to his feet, pacing in small circles through the field of discarded research and three a.m. insomniac revelations. He kicked them out of his path, sending several pieces of wiring and tiny screws hurtling through the air to collide with the rusted metal walls. He was still shaking, a bit less than before, but Hermann could see the hair along his arms standing up as if charged.

He levered himself up with the aid of his cane and a nearby desk, steadier on his feet than he expected. He stood fixedly in place until Newton came round full circle, pulling up short to avoid a crash. Hermann reached out an arm to steady him, and felt the hum of an overactive nervous system still firing on all cylinders.

'Where are your pills?' Hermann asked, even though he knew the answer. Newton squirmed and shook his head.

'I don't know, man. I think I lost them,' he answered, glancing away.

Hermann frowned and dropped Newton's arm, pacing over to his cluttered desk and digging around in the bottom right hand drawer. His hand closed around a dark blue bottle, PPDCM standard issue, in the name of one Newton Geiszler. He shoved the bottle in Newton's hand, filling a small glass of water from the sink clearly labeled NO BIOWASTE and shoved that at him as well.

'You're going to take two of those,' Hermann insisted, hammering out the point with his cane, 'or I'm going to drag you down to Medical myself. They'll likely just give you a shot, instead. So it's your choice, Newton.'

Newt stared down at the tiny white pills cradled in his palm. 'They make everything so – so _dull_ , so linear. I don't expect you to understand, Hermann, really I don't -'

'Unfortunately, I _do_ understand,' Hermann interrupted. 'I didn't,' he amended with a flush of embarrassment, 'not before the Drift.'

'So you've seen how my brain works, and you still want me to just medicate it all away?' Newton said, disbelief plain in his tone. 'If you really understood the difference, you'd flush this entire bottle down the drain.'

'And how many days would it be before you slept?' Hermann asked quietly.

'I don't need to sleep! I can sleep plenty when I'm dead, all right?' Newton raised his voice, gesturing wildly enough to spill some of the water over the rim of the glass. 'For now I've got 209 tiles worth of bullshit to clean up or throw away or hell, just set fire to and after that I have to figure out where the fuck I'm going to go when they finally kick me out, because the only thing I'm good at was just rendered completely irrelevant!' He dry swallowed the pills in his hand and threw the glass hard enough to crack and slide down the sloping metal sides of the sink in pieces. 'Happy?' he asked, breathing hard and staring Hermann down.

Hermann glanced down at his feet. 'No,' he replied stubbornly. 'I'm not happy, and neither are you, but at least you'll eventually be calm enough to sort the rest of this out. You – I used to tell myself not to worry about you. Sometimes it even worked, for a while.' He looked back up to where Newton stood, shoulders heaving, eyes burning coals into his skin. 'I can't do that anymore. I _have_ to worry, because I can feel it from the outside in, and you can't.'

'So suddenly you know better than I do when it comes to my own brain?' Newt fired back, gesturing at his skull with both hands, astonished and sounding slightly horrified. 'What the hell is _wrong_ with you, man?'

Hermann shook his head slightly and turned toward the rusted metal doors, throwing in the towel. 'Everything, apparently,' he answered, his voice brittle, one hand on the button to unlock the lab. 'As per protocol.' _I don't know why I bother_.

'No, hey,' Newt called out from behind, following him nearly to the doorway. 'Don't – Hermann, don't leave,' he pleaded, and they both felt what it cost him to ask. 'Just – would you just stay, a little while?' Hermann turned and saw Newton bouncing back and forth from heel to toe, his hands jammed in his pockets. A human model of atomic vibrations, struggling simply to retain his own form. Ten years, and Hermann had never understood what it was like to have to generate your own gravity, or risk coming apart at the seams.

'You're going to be all right,' Hermann insisted, stretching out his arm to give Newton's shoulder a companionable squeeze. Newt shook his head tightly, his entire body quivering. He was trying to keep the panic at bay, building walls around his own mind to keep it from leaking out again, all for Hermann's benefit. Hermann didn't quite know what to say in the face of such a Herculean effort, and so he stumbled. 'You – Newton, you don't need me.'

_Yes, I do._

'Forget what I said,' Hermann backpedaled. 'It was pure arrogance to even speculate as to – by which I mean, well - the bottom line is, I can't tell you how to live your life. I'm sorry that I tried.' He knew it was still more thought than most people spared for Newton, until they needed a split second decision in combat, or a convenient distillation of a lifelong obsession double-spaced and bound on their desk. Then they left, while he broke down a little more with each fight to be heard, to be valued. To not be ignored.

Now I'm doing the same, Hermann thought. I'm foolish enough to think that I can walk away, like everyone else. Neither of us can just move on, can we?

'You can,' Newt answered, and Hermann wasn't sure if he'd spoken aloud, or if it even mattered anymore. 'But who's going to be crazy enough to stick around with me?' Hermann's mouth opened to speak but Newt didn't give him the chance. 'Not you. Don't lie. I heard you were taking an advisory position at CERN International.' He glanced off sideways, refusing to even look in Hermann's direction.

'Don't get me wrong, man,' Newt continued glibly, as though addressing the specimen jar in the corner. 'I'm happy for you. You're moving on, moving up in the world. You deserve it.'

'Newton -' Hermann tried again, cutting off when Newt raised his hand against it, tilting his head. He was silent for a long moment, before taking in a deep breath and looking back at Hermann.

'This. Is what. I do,' he yelled, voice steadily rising in volume as he gestured to the dissection tables, the DNA sequencers, the salvaged organs and parts of organs preserved in viscous fluid. He seemed to surprise even himself with the outburst, wrapping his own hands around his midsection, as if to hold himself in. 'This is the only thing I've ever wanted to do, and they're _gone_ , Hermann. They're just gone.' He seemed to visibly deflate, and Hermann slid his hand lightly down Newton's arm, unmoved.

'If it makes you feel any better,' Hermann offered softly. 'I'm almost entirely certain that's not the case.'

Newt looked up, a hint of the familiar spark behind hooded eyes. 'What makes you say that?'

'They've been here before,' Hermann reasoned. 'When they returned, they were met with resistance, but not at first, and eventually, not enough. We destroyed their dimensional corridor, yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't waiting even now for a more opportune time to resurface. They built the Breach, all we did was knock it down. You said it yourself, Newton,' Hermann continued, more forcefully. 'Our advances in technology led to the state of worldwide pollution that allowed them to survive here at all.' Newton tilted his head, considering.

'It took us fourteen months to construct the first functional Jaeger with a stable neural handshake. Two days ago, we lost the last of our working defenses. Word is, the PPDC is even clearing out Oblivion Bay to recycle the parts and channel their combined efforts into different avenues of engineering.' Newton scoffed at Hermann's pronouncements and shook his head, the vertebrae in his neck popping with a series of loud snaps.

'No one knows these beasts like you do,' Herman asserted. 'Compile your research. Write a book, write three. Teach courses in advanced Alien Biochemistry and Genetics. Brush up on your history; we may have barely won this round, but pyrrhic victories often lead to later defeats.'

Hermann glanced down to see that he'd once again taken Newton's hand where it clung to his side, latching their fingers back together during his impromptu speech. 'We won't be ready if they come back,' Newt responded, each word separate and tumbling from his mouth like stones into water.

'Not unless we choose to be vigilant and prepared,' Hermann answered. 'You have a unique chance to shape the course of the future, Newton. I would be terribly disappointed in you if you chose to let it pass you by.'

'They're still shutting us down,' Newt argued, sliding his glasses back up his nose. 'What good is my admittedly encyclopedic knowledge if everyone thinks we're in the clear? Huh? No one's going to fund research like that after just broadcasting to the entire world that we're finally safe.' Newt made a rude noise and an even more offensive gesture.

'The money's gone, Hermann, and even if I managed to convince _anyone_ that the monsters were still under the bed, the repercussions would be astronomical.' His free hand flew through the air, counting off points on his fingers as his diatribe continued. 'Protests, riots, lack of confidence in their governments and of course, by extension, the PPDC itself. It could even undermine the global economy.' He ran a hand through his hair in abject frustration.

'Besides,' Newt grumbled, kicking a stray widget that must have fallen off from something unimportant. 'They'd just laugh in my face, anyway. Story of my fucking life, right? I mean, hell, if I'm going to cry wolf, I might as well go join the Church of the Breach. At least they'd listen to me.'

'I heard their Pontifex committed suicide upon hearing our mission was successful,' Hermann tossed out with a shrug. 'That's at least one position open.' Newt blinked at him in shock before noticing the tiny smirk on Hermann's lips. He also realized he'd stopped shaking, at least for the moment. Colors rushed back into a normal spectrum, sounds retreated from Newt's eardrums, even the pounding of his own heart, which slowed even as he considered it.

_'Arschloch_ ,' Newt fired back fondly, reverting back to German out of habit while still squeezing Hermann's hand in his own. There was no substitute for his first language when it came to lobbing insults at his lab partner. Hermann's smirk grew into something resembling a genuine smile and Newton glanced down, scratching the back of his neck, embarrassingly unable to keep from mirroring the gesture.

Hermann cleared his throat and turned slightly to take in his carefully packed and labeled boxes with a critical eye. 'I'm not taking the job at CERN,' he said quietly, disentangling his fingers from Newton's grasp.

'Why not?' Newton asked slowly, stepping forward and tilting his head to see Hermann's face.

'Because it occurs to me that there are more important things I could be doing,' he replied, pressing his lips back into their habitual scowl of general disapproval. 'I don't play well with others, Newton, you know that. And besides, I despise French.'

Newton laughed aloud at that, his voice still a bit shaky. 'Qu'est-ce que vous avez contre français?' he teased, his accent predictably awful. Hermann rolled his eyes and heaved a long-suffering sigh, as close an answer as Newt was likely to get. He knew all too well that Hermann considered it his prerogative to be contrary, given what he claimed he put up with on a daily basis (meaning Newton). Newt had claimed that right since he was at least thirteen, given what _he_ had to put up with on a daily basis (meaning humanity). Hermann turned back, finding Newton a good deal closer than he remembered, and taking an involuntary step away to regain his balance. It felt like a mile.

'So,' Newton questioned, drawing out the vowel as he rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet. 'What are you going to do, then?'

'I haven't entirely decided,' Hermann replied quietly after a few moments, realizing he'd been staring at Newton's lips and allowing the silt to settle out in his mind. Newton's thoughts slowly ebbed and flowed around his own, as if no barrier existed between them at all. 'Jasper thinks he could get me in at EFPL,' Hermann continued aloud, strangely aware that it was unnecessary. 'Possibly even Oxford. I could certainly do worse than a physics professorship.'

'Please,' Newton waved him off. 'You taught graduate level particle physics in your sleep half the time. But hey, maybe hiding behind that blackboard again really would make you happy. What do I know? I'm just the crazy Kaiju groupie.'

'You're not crazy,' Hermann reprimanded, reaching out to slide the backs of his fingers down Newton's left cheek. 'No crazier than the rest of us, at least.'

'There aren't many of the rest of us left,' Newton reminded him, leaning into the touch. It seemed as though he could feel a current lazily passing them by overhead, exactly the same as when their thoughts and memories had mingled in the Drift. Just before the Kaiju hive-mind had stepped aboard, fusing them together while tearing them apart and making the universe infinitely more majestic and terrifying, just by virtue of their monolithic presence.

'You remember when Mako was still a kid,' Newt said, or thought, letting the connection between them strengthen as his eyes slipped shut. 'How she'd end up with us or Caitlin when she skipped class at the Academy?' A flood of images, from Hermann's mind, or across their minds, Newt couldn't tell. Back then they'd felt – they'd all felt – like a family, and one by one, year by year, they'd just fallen away. Jasper, Caitlin, Sergio, Yancy. Tamsin had been the worst, and not just for Pentecost and Mako.

'I don't think Mako was ever a child again after Tokyo,' Hermann replied after a long moment, silently sharing his gratitude for those that remained. 'But I do remember you covering for her, after she'd spent the entire day mucking about in Kaiju entrails instead of in class where she belonged.' His words chided, but something in his sentiment softened them with a nostalgic fondness.

'I can't help it if my research was more awesome than yours,' Newt contended. Hermann sniffed, and Newt saw Mako standing respectfully beside him, student and professor, learning the subatomic intricacies possessed by the structure and function of the Breach. That brought her skipping back to Newt's lab again, hair short enough to ruffle into spiked disarray. He remembered the teenaged pout she'd sport until Newt let her glove up and poke into the innards of the latest specimens he'd been able to retrieve or requisition.

She'd studied the precisely aimed strikes and counter-strikes that allowed a Jaeger to bring the giant creature down, winding up as so much research material in Lima, or Anchorage, or Hong Kong. No matter where Pentecost had them all stationed, she'd never stopped studying. The painstakingly gathered knowledge of the enemy that allowed Coyote Tango to defeat Onibaba high above her head, saving her life, seemed to serve as motivation and manifested as perseverance. She'd always recognized how important the K-Science division was, even when the Jaeger pilots got all the glory. Even when she wanted to join those pilots herself.

Newt didn't think he'd ever thanked her for that. Hermann was fairly certain she understood, and wouldn't ever need it said aloud. At least she was still with them; Newton was fairly certain he'd have cracked up for sure if Mako or Tendo had ever been lost, their humor and grace under pressure holding an entire Shatterdome together.

He could feel Hermann's disagreement like a cooling balm, more strongly than he felt Hermann's hand slip slightly from his neck and slide over his heart. _I wouldn't have let you crack_ , the words filling Newt's mind. _I'd have still been here. I'm here now._ Newton swayed forward slightly on his feet, resting his forehead against Hermann's while the room seemed to list and spin around them with barely perceptible shifts of motion.

'You're here,' Newt agreed softly. 'But you're leaving, just like everyone else.'

'And if I didn't?' Hermann asked. 'I'd only drive you crazy if I stayed, Newton. You know that.'

'Actually,' Newt refuted, wrapping his arm around Hermann's neck and holding him close. 'I'm pretty sure you're what drives me sane.' He tilted up his chin, pressing his lips to Hermann's, and everything changed. It was color and light and sound and memories, it was want and need and Newt didn't ever want to stop. He felt Hermann's hands slide down his back and settle at his hips, holding him steady. Newt cautiously opened his mouth and Hermann took it as an invitation, his tongue scorching hot like a revelation against Newton's skin.

Newton wasn't sure how the wall ended up at his back, or his shirt over his head and onto the floor, but he grinned, tugging off Hermann's layers of knit and plaid. He'd wanted that awful sweater gone all evening, anyway. He lost track of where his hands started and Hermann's skin began, the lingering Drift erasing all barriers as their mouths met and tangled and moved across warm stretches of flesh.

Hermann knew the door was locked, knew that no one would even think to bother them way down here. When Newt's long, deft fingers tugged at his belt and buttons, he offered no protest. It was unthinkable; he was as lost to this as he'd ever been, every lingering look in Newton's direction, every clever meeting of minds savored at top volume. Every time he'd ever worried, and then, finding him there on the floor, seizing beneath the Pons helmet and still somehow triumphant, still _here_ -

Newt brushed away his worries, all those resilient doubts and fears. Hermann felt them swirl away, picked up by a nameless tide. His hand in Newton's hair felt like someone tugging on his own, Newton's mouth against his skin somehow seemed to be his lips, pressing back. He dissolved, and Newt felt the rough scrape of the wall beneath his hand as Hermann braced himself, felt the sensation race through his own nerves as he slipped his hands beneath neatly pressed khaki pants and shoved them down. Lost himself in the feel of his tongue against Hermann's erection through his briefs, finally pushing those away as well and feeling the moan in Hermann's throat when he took him inside his mouth, warm and soft and wet.

Hermann broke like a wave, felt it ripple through Newton and instead of pulling him up, Hermann felt himself pulled down to the floor amid a pile of their discarded clothing. A fierce stab of pain ricocheted between them and they adjusted, patches of bare floor cold against their skin. Hermann's hands caressed and teased, slipping beneath tight jeans and looser elastic in their quest for what they wanted. When Newton bit down on his lip, Hermann felt the teeth leave marks in his own mouth. Newt clung to him, his jaw dropping open while his hips thrust forward and back. Hermann couldn't be sure which end of the motion he was on, but he felt Newton's face pressed close against his neck, felt breath run hot and close over his skin. He found all the right places, as though he knew them already by heart, heard Newton's heartbeat racing as if it were inside his chest, instead. Felt him tip over the edge as if falling off the cliff himself, and stayed there, soothing the shudders that followed with a firm hand.

Neither one of them knew just how long they stayed there, half-cushioned on a pile of their own clothes, warm and sticky and so deep in each others' minds that it felt like coming home. No words were needed, but limitless thought and reach remained. Eventually, Newt felt Hermann shiver at the metallic chill in the air, or perhaps Hermann felt the raised hairs along Newton's spine triggered by the cold, or simply a rush of sensation without beginning or end. Either way, they packed each other back into an acceptable amount of clothing and gathered up the rest, switching off the lights and pulling open the doors into the hallway. It was empty, their footsteps echoing as they reached the twin set of doors on either side of the passage.

Newt paused for a moment, and Hermann pulled him along behind, unlocking his door (he was mostly certain it was his) and falling back on the mattress. Newt muttered something about Hermann's shoes and he thought they ended up under the bed. His pants and Newton's jeans on the desk chair, his sweater nowhere to be found. ( _Good_.) The blankets on the bed wrapping close and warm as they dropped off into sleep, wound about each other as if thoughts made into flesh.

. . .

  _Y_ _ou're not leaving?_

 

_Of course not._

. . .

 

The book Newton wrote while holed up in Hermann's flat in Oxford, detailing K-Science Division's role in the Kaiju War sold very well indeed, prompting a book tour and no small amount of celebrity. After the second printing rolled out and he began to see some profits, Newt insisted on paying his half of the rent. Hermann allowed it, knowing how much it meant to Newton to pull his own weight, even in tiny matters like their modest ground floor dwelling. Newt never ceased to be surprised by the number of readers his work found outside of traditional scientific circles, though really, Hermann reassured him, he shouldn't be. He'd always planned on being a rock star, after all.

He'd laughed at that, over the phone, spending the night in some foreign city while Hermann taught applied mathematics, neural-link based engineering, and several physics-related classes that made Newton's brain hurt just thinking about. And he did think about them, sometimes signing readers' books with equations instead of his own name or a tiny scribbled Kaiju below the header. If the groups were too large, the questions becoming too specific or Newton's patience running particularly thin, Herman would break a glass or a piece of chalk, or sometimes reschedule a lecture altogether. It wasn't exactly convenient, but the best discoveries are often the ones with enough power to reshape reality around them, just to make room.

Newton wasn't always gone, far from it. By age 40, he'd decided that the rock-star life was better left to those younger attention-seekers who didn't remember the War quite the way he did, in scars and folded flags and men being gobbled up in front of him in the streets. He'd seen the Precursors, seen the Kaiju spawning pools and cage-matches for supremacy. He'd looked into their beady rows of eyes and if that wasn't the definition of bowel-cleansing fear, then Newt clearly didn't understand the primal instinct at all.

Besides, he had his own target audience at home that never wavered. And if the neighbors banged on the walls from time to time because an argument had grown too loud, or stirred up a ruckus late into the night when 'normal, decent people' were just trying to get some sleep, well, Newt thought thought that was pretty funny, too.

He couldn't avoid the attention when textbooks began citing his work as timely and relevant sources, digging up ten years worth of papers published under the PPDC as first-hand accounts of the War. Esteemed journals republished his work while asking for updates and new contributions. Eventually Newt bowed to academic pressure and simply _wrote_ the textbook on Breach-specific alien biochemistry and genetics. It quickly became standard in many advanced programs, including the newly reinstated Jaeger Academy under Drs. Lightcap and Schoenfeld, under the watchful eye of Marshal Hansen.

Furthermore, it seemed Hermann Gottlieb wasn't the only physicist to debate the potential recurrence of the Breach, loudly and publicly, along with the need for an effective, well-funded response held on permanent alert. When the cities along the Rim revolted and politicians finally started to listen, Newt streamlined the science and wrote a field guide for them, too. After much debate ('Come on, do you really want these things to rely on substandard A.I.?'), Hermann even agreed to code the Mark VI series of Jaegers going into production. Many of the same engineers responsible for the previous generation rebuilt the machines from the ground up, paying tribute to the Collossi from days gone by in style and design. Soon the first of many prototypes were ready for testing, and not long after an entirely new line stood as proud sentinels. Only six years had passed since the last Mark V had gone out in a blaze of glory still marked by yearly vigils and moments of silence. Marshals around the Rim assigned Rangers their Jaeger teams straight out of the twin Academies in Tokyo and San Francisco as quickly as Drift compatibility could be discovered, dispatching them to train while learning the ins and outs of the local coastlines they were sworn to defend.

Their vigilant Jaegers and ever-ready pilots maintained a barrier from Auckland to Sydney to Fiji, Hawaii and Midway and Micronesia. From Maluka to Manila, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Busong to Kimchaek to Vladivostok. Kagoshima to Tokyo to Sapporo. From the Bering Sea to the Gulf of Alaska and on down, Vancouver to Portland, and of course, the hallowed memorial grounds of San Francisco and Oblivion Bay. Los Angeles to Cabo San Lucas, Acapulco, Guatemala City, Managua and the Panama Canal stood well defended, as did Guayaquil and Lima, Shatterdomes refitted and occupied in the largest population centers. Satisfied and content, the eyes of the world could drift away from memories of terror, recovering, rebuilding, and sleeping through the night so long as The Pentecost Line would hold.

And hold it did when the need arose, the Breach reopening like a raw and bleeding wound ten years to the day after Gipsy's nuclear core had blown it to hell and back. The Precursors' first volley sent three Category IV Kaiju hurtling toward Hong Kong, wound up and angry, precisely as Hermann had predicted. He had little time to feel vindicated, given the gravity of the situation, but Newt could feel the warm pulse of satisfaction curling around his chest, even if he chose to remain silent.

Veterans of the Kaiju War greeted one another as old friends at Mission Control, some more grizzled than others, but all still ready to serve. Titan Echo, Calypso Queen and Whiskey Bravo deployed into the harbor without a hitch. Whiskey had originally been christened Wildfire Bravo, but her team of Rangers had surreptitiously painted her with their own designation in the dark hours between shifts. Hansen had decided to let it go, as Brady and Colin Hannigan possessed the highest Drift compatibility scores seen since the days of the Kaidonovskys.

Piloted expertly by Rangers Becket and Mori, Titan Echo held the Miracle Mile nearly on their own while the other Jaeger teams met the second and third Kaiju well away from shore. Each team suffered massive damage after hours of prolonged combat with the hastily named Garuda and Ikuchi, but still managed to destroy two out of three beasts before they could made significant landfall. Newt watched their progress from Mission Control, images of the giant beasts projected about the room as if he were standing in a hall of mirrors. He didn't know which way to turn, disorientation making him dizzy. He felt Hermann's hand grip his arm as a swarm of memories enveloped him; that night in the public shelter, feeling the earth tremble above, watching those immense claws part the concrete like butter and knowing with absolute certainty that Otachi had come for _him_. His abject panic, running through the narrow and nearly deserted streets of the slum, turning around to see the beast bearing down on the city with unfathomable force. His paralyzing fear when the infant had broken free from its mother's womb, small and incompletely formed, yet still capable of devouring a man whole.

Newton Geiszler had never in his life been ambivalent about his successes and discoveries, but this? Suddenly, the chaos unfolding before him felt nothing like triumph. Watching three Category IV Kaiju rushing the city where he stood, out for blood and mayhem and – he was certain he could feel it – _revenge_ – the very thought made him tremble. Hermann steadied him, reminding him wordlessly that it was their work, their research that had made an extraordinary defense possible, and it would be their continued efforts that helped push the beasts back wherever and whenever they struck. At least, that was his hope, or their hope, Newton couldn't tell and didn't have the wherewithal left to bother sorting it out.

They stood and watched as the last Kaiju, code-named Bargeist, slipped past Titan's deep water sonic pulse attack and breached itself on shore. Newton couldn't help but feel a twinge of guilt at the destruction that would follow in waves, first from the kill, and later from the acid melting a once populated area into an unlivable pit. It looked as though the Bone Slums might double in size, nearly overnight. The Jaeger pursued, sending side-mounted rockets tearing deep into the creature's flesh, releasing wide nets over its festering, sun-exposed skin while driving deep holes into its interior. Titanium caps spun out beneath the scales, releasing a linked series of reverse spikes deep into its muscle mass to keep the Kaiju from pulling them out without sustaining mortal damage.

Newt jumped a foot in the air when the report came back to LOCCENT, slapping Hermann on the shoulder and wrapping and arm around Tendo's neck. Those rockets had been his idea, and he wasn't about to stop gloating and dwell on the consequences now. Hermann reminded Newt calmly that while the intended effect of the weaponry against soft spots in Kaiju anatomy had in fact been his idea, the form and design of the rockets themselves were down to his plainly superior engineering skills. Tendo rolled his eyes and escaped Newt's death grip, raising his hands from the A.I. Controls to keep the two of them at bay.

'I am getting too old for this shit,' he muttered, and called out for all teams to report in. Their neural handshakes remained strong and holding, and while Calypso and Whiskey waded ungracefully toward shore, Titan's team posed their Jaeger for newsreel headlines, one foot pressing down atop Bargheist's grotesquely divided rotting skull. Tendo cut off their audio and tried diligently to hold a disapproving scowl, but failed, his face cracking into a grin as the celebration expanded out from Mission Control and down into the refitted Shatterdome.

As first engagements go, this one had been an unqualified success, and he saw the reasons reflected back at him, giving out high fives, congratulating one another, and in the case of Marshal Hansen, smiling coolly and defiantly at the huge screen showing feeds from chopper-mounted cameras hovering in the area. Max leaned faithfully against his legs, his thin coat fur showing patches of gray, but his enthusiasm remained as undimmed as any in the room.

A war like this wasn't won with one battle, and while the Marshal welcomed back his Rangers, they all knew to keep up their guard. All three of the massive machines needed drastic repairs, and they'd have to find room in the budget for extensive requisitioning, just to patch the holes and refit the armaments. The Kaiju had shown they meant business, a fact never in doubt by those that had faced them before, and hopefully a triple event on this scale would convince the leaders of the Pan Pacific Alliance that their previous investments had more than paid off.

If Newt drank a bottle of extremely expensive champagne and showed off as many of his new tattoos as he could get away with in public, and Hermann tripped up a few new K-Science Division flunkies in the hallways leading down to their quarters, well, they supposed they could be excused. They'd damned well earned it. Newt and Hermann fell into bed in their (thankfully) larger quarters, tangled together and exhausted, and couldn't think of any place on earth they'd rather be.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I would never finish this, whew. I can't read fic while I'm writing, and I've been traveling and trying to work on it but I feel like I'm so behind on fandom and it makes me want to _cry_. I love this fandom so very, very much and I just want to give back in every way I can.
> 
> I know rather a lot about mania and panic attacks, and while I've used a cane from time to time, I don't have permanent injuries that require one to walk, so if I've made any mistakes with Hermann's characterization, please correct me. The same goes for my godawful French (sorry francophiles!)
> 
> I love each and every one of you that reads this fic, because it took me so long to feel like I got it right. Major kudos to iliadawry for the beta read, for she is perceptive and very wise.


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